Looking at Art and Literature

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how titles influence the way we look at paintings. I cannot help but feel that, in many instances, titles are the artist’s concession to the viewer’s need for meaning and not an expression of a particular intention. At least that is what many artists tell me. Others admit that the title is their own attempt to make sense of the process that led to the creation of that particular piece. A translation into words of what first appeared as an image, or a colour, or a tentative brush stroke on an empty canvas. Making sense of an intention they did not know they had. The need to make sense of the stirrings of our internal world is strong. Titles carry authority: they are an expression of an author’s mind, of their conscious intention, much as the artistic work is an expression of what lies outside conscious intentionality. Perhaps we can think of the title as a passage or a conduit between unconscious motivation and conscious intentionality; a portal into another world; a gateway to the imagination.

When I first saw Deon Venter’s painting, I immediately thought about the title's (“In the Avatar”) significance to the scene unfolding before my eyes. The painting is based on a real location, the Avatar Forest, near Port Renfrew, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, so I knew the title had a literal meaning. Perhaps here, I thought, in Freud's (apocryphal) words, "a cigar is just a cigar." But I knew about the origins of the word "avatar" in Hindu religion, as a manifestation of the divine in human form, a divinity embodied. The metaphoric connotations of the name are obvious. Yet, there are no human forms in this painting, no incarnated gods, only an agglomeration, a thick impasto of vertical and horizontal lines, semi-circles, oval shapes, squiggles and scratches densely layered over the surface of the canvas. Taken together, these shapes and their colours—a rich combination of browns, green and blues, sprinkled with red, pink and orange dabs—convey the sumptuousness (the thickness of the paint, the corrugated surfaces) and majesty of a forest, a living and growing forest in all its physical grandeur. There is no human grandeur here, no divinity incarnated, but the vastness of nature— Nature's spirit, embodied in the trees and given expression in the semi-circles and oval shapes punctuating the canvas: an arcane language of undecipherable symbols.

More important than the image represented (or abstracted is perhaps a better description ), for me, is the experience this painting makes available. Looking at this forest of rich colours and thick textures, I am transported into the experience of “being” in the forest—as a part of the forest’s "being" and as a "being" that is separate from it—a feeling that is both exhilarating and unsettling. To enter the avatar, then, in the way that Venter’s painting conceives of it, is to enter another body, to be re-embodied, which is also a way to have access to another, more intense way of being. What are bodies but material containers for our “being,” for the stirrings of our internal world? The forest as body, as avatar, another space where these stirrings, this awareness of being alive and fully present in the world, can be experienced in all their breathtaking and troubling intensity. Now that I am “in the avatar,” I sense the painting’s (the forest’s) heavy presence, its motionless materiality, but also its vitality and exuberance, what literary critic Gaston Bachelard calls the forest’s “intimate immensity” or the “immediate immensity of its depth,” which is also the feeling that there is “something else to be expressed besides what is offered for objective expression.” (The Poetics of Space, 186) This “something else” is the “sense of mystery” that, according to philosopher David E. Cooper, permeates our experience of being in the world, of becoming part of an emergent world we cannot comprehend, as it escapes “objective expression," but we still feel at home in.

Venter’s “In the Avatar,” with its tangled mess of lines and squiggles, long and short brush strokes, thickly layered and scratched surfaces and arcane symbols captures the “mysterious upsurge,” the “coming to be” of the world that Cooper so beautifully describes in these lines. This is what an emergent world looks like and feels like. This is what "being" in the presence of the divine (the original meaning of "avatar") really means: to be enclosed, embodied, bathed in the source of things; to be gathered and then released into being, a being that is as physical and material as it is mysterious and ineffable.

In Cooper’s words (and Venter’s imagination) to be "In the Avatar,” is “To experience this gathering … [this] mystery of emergence, an epitome of that larger coming to presence that is the human world as a whole.” (Cooper, 65)

Sometimes, titles, like the paintings they name, really are portals to the imagination.

"In the Avatar," Deon Venter, oil on canvas

"Deon Venter exhibits internationally in leading contemporary fine art galleries. His work is included in the permanent collections of museums, national galleries, and notable public and private collections in Canada, the U.S.A., the U.K., Europe and Africa.Between 2002 and 2008, Venter’s paintings have been exhibited regularly at international art fairs on three continents. His unique content, method and use of material has stirred the interest of collectors worldwide.His critically acclaimed work has been reviewed in numerous newspapers and art magazines in Canada, South Africa and the U.S.A.Venter was born in 1953 in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. He graduated from Port Elizabeth School of Art and Design in 1976. He lectured at the University of Fort Hare, Republic of the Ciskei, and the Port Elizabeth School of Art and Design, South Africa.Venter immigrated to Canada in 1989 and currently lives on Saltspring Island, British Columbia." Courtesy of Venter Gallery, Saltspring Island, BC. Special thanks to gallery director Anthony Matthews.

A short analysis of Turner's painting inspired by John Berger's insightful essay on Turner in his book Portraits.

"Turner transcended the principle of traditional landscape: the principle that a landscape is something that unfolds before us," John Berger tell us in Portraits. Instead, Turner landscapes appear to "extend beyond [their] formal edges," working their way around the spectator "in an effort to outflank and surround him." (22)

"Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway" does not lend itself to easy description. It certainly didn't at the time when it was first exhibited. Neither the scene depicted nor the technique employed would have been easy to grasp or describe, even by an expert reviewer. "The world has never seen anything like this picture," the Victorian novelist ﻿W. M. Thackeray famously remarked﻿. This is because, Berger tells us, Turner's vision "dismisses or precludes words." (3)

In his essay, Berger points out a possible connection between the English painter's experiences as a child in his father's barber's shop and his imaginative vision, but reminds us that "they should be noticed in passing without being used as a comprehensive explanation." (5) We should not reduce Turner's style to a series of images, like "water, froth, steam, gleaming metal," or the "soapy liquid agitated by the barber's brush," or the "detritus deposited" on the water's surface (5). But as soon as one envisions the "soapy" froth floating on his father's barber's bowl, certain aspects of Turner's painting style become clearer, or perhaps more manageable. New images, other analogies begin to take shape. For me, "soapy froth" conveys perfectly the mess of paint I see forming at the centre of the canvas. Berger knows that a simple image can trigger a cascade of associations; his caveat to the reader not to read too much into the images he is suggesting is more like a signal to stop and consider the connection more closely--don't read too much into them; let them do their work in your imagination. A Turner landscape may dismiss language's explanatory power, but it certainly offers other ways to engage with it. And Berger knows.

Turner's vision "precludes words." There is nothing else we can do but to submit to the experience of being absorbed inside his space. Who hasn't felt, at least once, the irrepressible urge to step inside a painting and become part of its world? When I look at a Constable landscape, I feel comfortable remaining outside, as a viewer. When I look at a Turner landscape, I feel drawn into the scene, but I try to resist its pull, because I know I am being drawn into another place, one I'm not completely comfortable in, a "violent" place, like the scene of a crime. Berger notes that what is "so disturbing" about many of Turner's lanscapes is "the global indifference that they record," (18) but it is also this indifference that, in the last instance, "allows them to be seen as beautiful."(18) Turner's "violent" landscapes "preclude" the "outsider spectator, "(22) Berger adds, meaning that they do not allow the viewer to remain indifferent to their presence. I resist the magnetic force of the landscape unfolding before and around me, but I cannot deny its beauty, or its power. I am "surrounded" and "outflanked" by the elemental forces unleashed in the painting, by the speed and force of industrialization, by the approaching train; by the colours, the shadows, the globs of paint; I am absorbed by "The Maelstrom" (the title of another of Turner's landscapes).

Turner's paintings "preclude" words; they preclude an "outsider spectator." One has no choice but to be involved in a Turner landscape, to be a "spectator" looking at the scene from within. This is what John Berger believes. And that is what I believe, too.

The first body I encounter as I walk into the exhibition space is Ella's, the pre-pubescent girl depicted in Stephanie Denz's portrait of the same name (left corner). Ella exudes presence. Immersed in her own nascent sensuality, she only has eyes for herself. She is uninhibited. The two children in the painting next to her, "Curtains," also by Denz, return my gaze, eyes sparkling with curiosity. What do they know that I don't? I wonder. The wisdom of the child. Their experience of the world is pure and unmediated. Their bodies and minds are soft and malleable. Ella's body exudes a delicate sensuality, but the boy on the left has his gaze fixed on me: "I'm here," his eyes say, "I'm present. I see you too. I know." Mind and body. Childhood as the place where body and mind, the sensual and the intellectual, have yet to become separate entities.Below, Lynn Demers's bronze head sculptures "Contemplation" and "Serenity" convey another kind of presence, a confident sense of being that emanates from their polished surfaces and perfectly symmetrical features. These are idealized representations of the body conforming to traditional canons of beauty. The children are also idealized, that's true, but their sense of self remains connected to their bodies, while Demer's sculptures symbolize a "higher" state of being beyond the body, perhaps in the Platonic realm of eternal ideas or in the superconscious state beyond the senses and the intellect— the Atman or all-encompassing consciousness of Vedanta philosophy. Transcending the body to attain a state of pure presence. Presence through absence.

"Teenage Girl," Renee Sanden

Absence. A theme explored, from a different perspective, by Renee Sanden's plexiglass sculpture "Teenage Girl," part of her "Invisible Ones" series. Situated behind Demer's "Contemplation," this piece speaks of the anguish and emptiness of adolescence, that transitional and ambiguous space between childhood and adulthood. The joy and confidence of childhood has given way to uncertainty about the self and her place in the world. There is a void at the centre of this girl's being. She needs to be seen but does not know how to make herself visible; sometimes she hopes she could be truly invisible. The girl is still only the shadow of the adult she is to become, and yet she shines. The plexiglass confers solidity to the absent figure, giving her a hard edge ​and making her absence both tangible and visible. Renee Saden's "Teenage Girl" affirms Paul Klee's famous dictum about the function of art: to make visible the invisible.

"Emily," Alanda Nay

Amanda Nay's underwater photograph "Emily," presents the body in confinement. I see her body as doubly bound here, first by the material she is wrapped in, and then by the water. Like a foetus inside the womb, protected yet constrained. There is something ghostly about the image, too; she reminds me of an ectoplasm— the materialization of spiritual energy that mediums conjured up in their seances— as if the body was always in process, never finished. I also think about the phantasmatic body posited by psychoanalysis, the primitive body of pure physical sensations, a kind of archaic, malleable body before the constitution of subjectivity. For Jung, "water means spirit that has become unconscious." Freud used the image of an iceberg to represent the conscious and unconscious minds, with the larger unconscious instinctual part hidden underwater. Both concepts are articulated in Nay's photo. Interestingly (and controversially), Freud referred to female sexuality as "the dark continent of psychoanalysis."(The Question of Lay Analysis, 35) Body or spirit ? Or maybe something else. A suggestive image that refuses to settle on any one interpretation. Art that pushes against its own limits.

Pencil Drawings by Martin Herbert

In contrast, Martin Herbert's delicate pencil drawings of women, located to the left of Nay's piece, bring my attention back to the present, reminding me that art is also about real people in the world. These drawings project a sense of the body at ease with its surroundings, of bodies that are comfortable in their own skin. They do not aim to transcend the moment; they are rooted in the moment. These women inhabit the present with grace and confidence. Everyday bodies, everyday situations.

"Morning Wash," Diana Dean

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​At the other end of the hall, Diana Dean's "Morning Wash" reminds me that, sometimes, the spiritual can manifest itself in the most ordinary situations. With its rich red tones and grainy surface reminiscent of a Roman fresco, Dean's painting captures an intimate moment in the life of a couple (modelled on Dean herself and her husband), their morning wash. The scene is bathed in an intense light that appears to shine through the wallpaper pattern in the other room, giving it the appearance of stained glass in a church. This almost supernatural light, along with the figures' stillness, transforms an everyday scene into a sacred space that speaks of the mysteries of marriage. Despite its religious connotations, this is not a religious painting in the narrow sense of the word—it does not celebrate the Christian institution of marriage. Rather, it asks the viewer to see the ordinary as an occasion for contemplation and reflection. It tells us that we can find the sacred in the body's everyday gestures.Love's Mysteries in souls do growBut yet the body is his book.​John Donne, "The Ecstasy"​

"Portraits of Older Women," Susan Benson

The body as a book is a well-known metaphor. Susan Benson's beautiful portraits of old women, located in the main hall, explore the ways in which experience is engraved on our bodies. Benson's attention is focused on the face, on the way the skin folds and gathers around eyes, cheeks and mouth, its sagging contours. Asymmetry is an important theme here: traditional canons of beauty favour balance and symmetry, but as we age, we lose our balance, we become crooked. Benson wants to draw attention to these crooked moments, when the body becomes an unknown country. "This is no country for old men," Yeats laments, "An aged man is but a paltry thing." ("Sailing to Byzantium"). And for women?, Benson's paintings ask. Is age "but a paltry thing' too? Perhaps —age is unkind to all of us, but can you see these women's indomitable spirit? Their very special beauty, the joy in their eyes— also their sadness, their resignation, their acceptance. Life as it really is, here and now. Susan Benson's portraits capture these women's essence, what life is about: "Life," Virginia Woolf reminds us, "is what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of—what? That life's like that, it seems." ( Virginia Woolf, "An Unwritten Novel")

"Crouching Man," Mel Williamson

​ Just opposite, Mel Williamson's nude "Crouching Man" presents the viewer with a powerful, almost visceral, exploration of the materiality of the flesh. Williamson uses bold, dramatic painterly brushstrokes to convey the body's almost brutal physicality. I see the body in its purely physical dimension. At the same time, the figure remains bound by strict rules of proportion. There is definition in the muscles: no excess of flesh. And yet, when I look more closely at the area illuminated on the man's back, I see something forming, a new shape. Is this human skin? Or is it something radically other? The shape I see emerging has the contours of a piece of meat. I think of Francis Bacon's bodies mapping an "undecidable zone between the human and the animal." (Gilles Deleuze) The more I look at this patch of flesh, the more I notice the shape and texture of the brushstrokes, the consistency of the paint—skin as paint or paint as skin? The two blend indistinguishably. As I experience the materiality of the body, I become aware of the materiality of the paint (the material prima) its consistency: warm, oily, earthy, somewhat viscous, slightly waxy. I realize that this painting is as much about the body as it is about the process that James Elkins calls "the alchemy of substance and action," about paint itself, "its masses and colours ... and moods." (James Elkins, What Painting Is, 5) Skin, flesh, oil paint, canvas. A true "body of work". A work from the body, of the body.

"Self-Portrait of the Artist as Neil Young," John MacDonald

Paint as substance, a mixture of different materials—pigment, resin, solvent and additives—applied on the canvas. Its textures and colours, lights and shadows. Hard and compact in places, soft and pliable in others. John MacDonal's "Self-Portrait of the Artist as Neil Young" is less interested in representing the body of the painter (his own body) than in dramatizing the material act of painting itself: the movements of the hand across the canvas, the smaller details, body and hand changing positions, moving to an unknown rhythm. This painting is about movement, even if the main figure is at rest—the movement of the light, of the colours, the eye, the hand, the mind ... I have to admit there is something about the explosion of colours, the faceless figure and the expressionistic brushwork that makes me uncomfortable. My eye cannot settle on the objects depicted on the canvas; as soon as I try to fix my gaze on a recognizable image or colour, they begin to disintegrate ... I am overwhelmed by an excess of paint: "Every painting captures a certain resistance of paint ... in the same moment that it captures the expression of a face." (Elkins, 2) It is the materiality of the painting, its exuberance, that disturbs me. Its resistance to my gaze. Its unavoidable presence.

Janis Woode sculptures in wrapped steel wire

In contrast, Janis Woode's twisted steel wire sculptures seem to emphasize stability, while at the same time exploring the tension between negative and positive space, delicacy of line and strength of structure, motion and stasis. Sturdy yet buoyant, these figures make me think of the metaphors we use to describe the sculpted bodies of athletes and dancers: wiry, sinewy, fibrous, ropy, stringy— all words associated with everyday materials. In fact, it is the material that keeps insinuating itself through the humanized shapes, the metal, with all its connotations of artificiality, technology and machinery. Instead of graceful gymnasts, suddenly I see automatons, mechanical beings with human form but lifeless, inert. The human and the inhuman inhabiting the same mesh of wire. It is only a fleeting image, but one that stays in my memory. These figures remind me that the border between the animate and the inanimate is not fixed but porous and fluid.

From the moment Narcissus saw his own image reflected on a pool, human beings have been compelled to create images of themselves, driven by the desire to recapture that first moment of self-recognition. But it is not only the self that we are compelled to represent. We are also drawn to the other, who is so similar to us and yet so different. The encounter with the other is always complicated by conflicting emotions: fear, excitement, hope, anxiety, doubt, joy ... We long to see ourselves reflected in their gaze, to be recognized or to be mirrored back "simplified," to paraphrase Joni Mitchell ; sometimes, to feel that things are more complex, that there is more to discover.

What we seek in the other, then, is a transformative experience, " a metamorphosis of the self." (Christopher Bollas, Collected Writings) Many times, we approach a work of art with the same trepidation, the same desire to be recognized and, thus, transformed by the aesthetic experience. Perhaps this is what we want from art, a change of perspective, a renewed awareness or simply the realization that some mysteries defy explanation.

Walking through the exhibition space and looking at the different representations of the body through the gaze of the other —different eyes, different media and materials— I felt as if I was encountering those bodies, as if they were presenting themselves to me, for the first time: children, teenagers, elderly people; the body in its social and spiritual dimensions; confined bodies; invisible bodies and exuberant bodies; bodies in motion and bodies at rest; the fleshy material body; the human and the inhuman. I also felt another kind presence, something I am not always aware of or sensitive to: the body of the work itself, the paint in all its unavoidable materiality, its allure and also its resistance to my controlling gaze. I became aware of the different materials used by the sculptors, their thematic significance and emotional weight. More importantly, I felt that these bodies— these works—were not fully finished but in the process of becoming, of being continuously transformed in my eyes, the eyes of the viewer. I knew then that I was the works' own "transformational object," the mirror on which they need to see themselves reflected. Art as an endless process of becoming, for the work and for the viewer. This is the true aesthetic experience.

"I look for a subconscious quality in places and people. Figures moving and scenes unfolding in magic realism tones. [...]

My work has nostalgia, sometimes interrupted/augmented with use of found materials and overlaid shapes. My key interest is in relationships; individuals with their environment, conscience and or social contexts, whose tensions shape the narrative. [...]

I am intrigued with how inner proccesses come to light through relationships. I often include found materials in my surfaces to bring my surroundings to the image. Its otherness works unpredictably and gives meaning to the contradictory nature of experiences.”

A long-established Salt Spring painter and visual artist, Stefanie Denz was born and raised in Duncan, British Columbia. After completing the University of Victoria Fine Arts Program, Denz won a Commonwealth scholarship for an MFA at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has worked in many collaborative arts projects and her work has been exhibited in New Zealand, the US, Germany and Canada. Here is a link to her website.

"Strange" is the adjective I've most often heard in connection to Stefanie Denz's paintings, usually followed by other words like "beautiful," "alluring," "seductive," and "surreal." This post is an attempt to explore the complex sense of strangeness and allure that seems to envelop the work of Stefanie Denz through an analysis of one of her most emblematic paintings, "Flower." What follows is intended as a series of reflections suggested by the painting, not an authoritative interpretation of the work. In a way, I am reading the painting as I would a poem or piece of prose, starting with a specifically rich word or feeling and following its movement across the text. Maybe not the most orthodox way to analyze a work of art, but one that is, I think, close to Denz's own method. Let's see where it takes us.

The Uncanny: the feeling of unease that arises when something familiar suddenly becomes strange and unfamiliar. A blurring of the boundaries between real and dream worlds. An opening, a tear in the fabric of everyday reality that reveals other, hidden "realities"beyond appearances.

When I look at Stefanie Denz's painting "Flower," the word uncanny immediately comes to mind. What do I find unsettling about this painting? Where does its familiar unfamiliarity lie? It is obvious that I am not looking at a realistic portrayal of a social gathering, even though both setting and people are depicted in a realistic, if somewhat stylized manner. I am looking at something more, something other. In a recent talk at Salt Spring Island's local library, Denz described the painting as a drama between a mother (the woman in the yellow dress) and her son in a (kind of) domestic setting. Denz is interested in relationships and how these can be rendered on the flat surface of a painting, so her analysis of the scene focused on its realistic and narrative elements. The other figures in the quartet, the sleeping father and the girl crawling towards the door, are secondary characters in this family drama. Perhaps the mother is jealous of the girl (her son's love interest?) and this is why she is leaving the room. Maybe the whole scene is a dream created by the father—the shadowy figure lying on his side at the front of the room. (S. Denz, "Women in my Paintings: Narratives of Discovery within Cover Spaces," Salt Spring Island Library, August 5, 2015). Denz provided several clues to help guide the viewer into its complexities, but, in the last instance, I felt that the scene was still open to interpretation. I could sense there was something more, an opening, an unfolding on the canvas— an insistent presence that defied explanation. What was it? What is it?

That giant flower in the middle of the painting. Why didn't I see it before, opening its petals and enveloping the actors in the drama within its own unfolding space? It seems that I was always already looking at a painting of a flower (the title held the clue all along) ; I just made the conscious decision to focus on the meaning of the story. But I was missing something important. This change in perspective was enough to shift my attention away from the painting's narrative possibilities to its visual aspects. I moved from the seen to the unseen. As Paul Klee once remarked, the purpose of art is not to "reproduce the visible" but to "make visible" (The Diaries of Paul Klee, Google Books). I suddenly became aware of other worlds, other realities shimmering beyond the visible world depicted in Denz's domestic scene and materializing, as a flower, into one of those "moments of being" that Virginia Woolf believed reside behind"the cottonwool of daily life," her phrase for the banal trivialities of daily existence (Moments of Being, 72). Or perhaps the flower is a manifestation of something else entirely, something more sinister. Whatever it "is," the flower's refusal to be pinned down, to fit neatly into the scene's dramatic composition, remains its most fascinating if unsettling feature.

"I'm interested in places beyond real time," Denz explained in the introduction to her talk at the library. Interior spaces, places that evoke "psychic time." Is the flower a visual evocation of our unconscious, that realm of buried memories, dreams and secret desires suggestively described by Julia Kristeva as "[a] strange land of borders and otherness" where the self is "ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed"? (Strangers to Ourselves, 191) It would seem so. Psychic time does not follow a linear or chronological pattern. Our mental life, including its unconscious processes, as Freud noted, "is timeless," not subjected to traditional limitations of time and space. This atemporality gives our dreams—the way the unconscious makes itself manifest—their characteristically static and frozen appearance. Not unlike the flower in Denz's painting, I notice. Its centre and one of its petals—or the petal-like shapes extending from it—appear solidified, or in the process of becoming so, as if they were carrying too much "psychic" weight. Though not all the petals share this quality; some are light and airy, while others have a consistency between solid and liquid. Like a pool of oil. Almost viscous. Like a membrane. The petals' malleability, their shifting plasticity suggests that Denz has a more dynamic vision of our psychic world. After all, as Freud and other psychoanalysts (even neurologists) have noted, the unconscious is not a monolithic structure but a dynamic field, a reservoir of energies and drives connected to both mental and bodily processes. Is the flower a physical manifestation of these complex dynamic processes, that is, is it their material representation? Oil on panel, paint on a material surface. These are real, tangible substances.Now I understand the relationship between nostalgia and Denz's use of reclaimed materials in many of her paintings, "my work has nostalgia, sometimes interrupted/augmented with use of found materials and overlaid shapes." A shape can bring us back to the material and visual realities of the canvas, suspending the dramatic action and letting it rest in one emotionally-charged moment.

Nostalgiaresides in the deepest parts of our psyche. Like the unconscious, or the uncanny, the nostalgic feeling manifests itself in the most unexpected of circumstances, as a sudden surge of emotion that feels almost like physical pain (the word nostalgia comes from the Greek algos [pain] and nostos [return]). Not unlike a poetic image, "an emergence ... a flare-up of being in the imagination" (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xviii), nostalgia emerges fully formed, a core of fluctuating emotions. I see now that the flower could also be a manifestation of nostalgia as "a flare-up" on the flat surface of the canvas. Denz has not superimposed extra materials on the painting (see "My Mother," below). Instead, she has set out to create the sense of space filling and growing (becoming three-dimensional) through the careful use of shape and colour. The effect is striking. Past memories, fears, tensions and desires are gathered together to form a flower, the traditional symbol of love in Western culture. Yes, now I see its timeless symbolism coming to the surface and the word that emerges is "connection":

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect..."E. M. Forster, Howards End

I look at "Flower" again and I sense E. M. Forster's impassioned appeal to connect, to gather, to bring together, but the human psyche is too complex and contradictory to be explained away by a call to universal love, nostalgia, or any other all-embracing concept. And Denz knows this, even as she tries to explain the painting to her audience at the library. She knows that there will always be something in this painting that resists interpretation, an "unruliness" that even the artist cannot tame. "Real art," as Susan Sontag remarks, "has the power to make us nervous." The act of interpretation, with its emphasis on intention and meaning, can be no more than an attempt to "tame" art's fundamental intractability, "Interpretation makes art comfortable, manageable" (Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 8 ). Stefanie Denz's paintings of social and domestic spaces are neither manageable nor comfortable. They refuse to give in to easy explanations— they remain "strange," undomesticated.

"To make strange" is one of the functions of art. Each artist explores this strangeness in a different, highly personal way. Denz's work focuses on the unseen psychic forces that permeate our domestic and social spaces, turning them into the scenes of complicated and mysterious dramas overlaid with strange and shifting shapes. The strangeness of her paintings, their "uncanniness," lies in their capacity to make visible the invisible while still remaining rooted in everyday reality. They are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, tangible and intangible, real and dream-like. Unpredictable and changeable, like us. But they are still works of art, grounded in the here-and-now of our present human reality. That is something that no flight of imagination can change.

Sometimes, art is not here to "mak[e] us more intelligible to ourselves" but to "help[...] us become more curious about how strange we really are” (Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty). Stefanie Denz's art does just that: it eschews easy explanations to focus our attention on just "how strange" "real" human experience can be. And that is why her paintings of interior spaces will continue to seduce us with their alluring colours, shapes and precise compositions, while at the same time displaying their radical strangeness, their "uncanny poetry."

"For the past 25 years[ Ronald Crawford ] has had extensive experience working on Salt Spring Island with functional and sculptural stonework. […] These works are made with a unique combination of plaster and acrylic paint, resulting in a modern variation on the frescoes. The surfaces are carved, shaped, sanded and painted until they take on a rich, naturally eroded appearance. The physical depth of the plaster gives a real surface for shadow and light to alter and enrich the image. Within the plaster, natural and man-made patterns co-exist in an uneasy alliance of form."Steffich Fine Art (Salt Spring Island)

Furrows, corrugations, grooves … meandering paths … ridges … soft waves and faint etchings blending with sharply-drawn geometrical shapes. In Ronald Crawford's landscape paintings, the natural and the man-made coalesce in "an uneasy alliance of" abstract and representational forms. "Although I'm put into the generalization of an abstract artist," Ron Crawford told me recently, "I do think of myself as a landscape artist." And landscape is the first thing I see when I look at "Resolute Ways," a landscape of great intricacy -- waves and ripples, a river cascading into the sea, an underwater seascape and a twilight sky rising in the distance, or is it a forest …? Slowly, abstract forms begin to emerge from the patterns carefully carved on the painting's plaster surface, "patterns," as Crawford explains to me, "inspired by the forces of natural erosion, water, light, and movement." I realize that, even as I try to make connections with the natural world this painting draws its inspiration from, I am also, and just as strongly, drawn to the rich abstract shapes emerging from its rugged surface. It is not that my eye cannot decide between figurative and abstract. It is the image itself that refuses to settle on either. Fixity and flux: these are the two forces coming together in an alliance that does not feel "uneasy" or forced, but necessary and organic.

Everything flows; everything changes, as Heraclitus said. Yet nature's processes also have their own inexorable rhythms, their paths leaving indelible imprints on the earth's surface. These are the forms carved and traced in Crawford's unique landscapes. Everything changes, and yet there is much that remains unchanged, like the passing of the seasons or the rivers' compulsion to flow towards the sea. We take comfort in the idea of a natural order, even though, or perhaps because, we know that it will lead inexorably to our own extinction. These are nature's "resolute ways." But even though we are subjected to the same constant natural forces, we are also able to alter the shape of our physical environment and its ways according to the patterns suggested by our imagination. And the human imagination has no limits.

There is something reassuring about a figurative landscape, perhaps a reminder of our permanent impermanence. At the same time, we relish the way abstraction hints at other modes of being beyond the physical and the finite. Abstract art challenges the ways we see our immediate material reality, imbuing it with mystery and a sense of the infinite -- turning the everyday into "something rich and strange." It is this active confluence of figuration and abstraction that gives "Resolute Ways" its particular power to engage our imagination. Whether we see the carvings and furrows as representative of specific objects or scenes in the real world or as evocations of our own fears and desires, there is a timeless quality to the painting that allows for endless interpretive possibilities.

When I first approached this painting at the gallery, I was attracted to its rugged physical surface, its grooves and corrugations. The intricate carvings and colourful incrustations were richly suggestive of the fossils and sediments accumulated over millions of years of geological and biological activity on earth. Earth's memories. A landscape that was being drawn, a text that was being written long before the human imagination began to reshape and remould its contours, to alter its "resolute ways." Crawford's vision embodies this timeless landscape before human intervention, and does so in a way that also calls attention to its own existence as a "man-made" object—a human creation. I think of Shakespeare's famous lines in The Tempest and how they inform my understanding of this painting:

"Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.""Ariel's Song," The Tempest

Art uses reality's "fossilized" remnants as its materials, imbuing them with new life. The physical world dies but is constantly renewed in the "sea-change" of our imagination. Ron Crawford understands the transformative power of art, especially when this art harnesses the forces of nature and imagination together in an effort to revitalize our perception of the world.

Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky believed that the real purpose of art is to renew our experience of reality, "Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony" ("Art as Technique," Russian Formalist Criticism, 12). Artistic technique makes form difficult -- "roughens" it (22) -- as a means to focus our attention on the object, so that we may perceive it in all its complexity and richness. Shklovsky called this effect of art "defamiliarization," from the Russian term ostraneniye, "to make strange." By making the object "unfamiliar" or strange, art allows us experience the object as if we were encountering it for the first time.

This image of art as a "roughening" of form to increase awareness is particularly relevant to Ron Crawford's method. Although colour and composition are important, the imaginative force of his paintings lies in their physically "roughened" surfaces and their ability to create "strange" and "rich" multidimensional forms that open up our senses to the complexity of the natural world that is their origin and end. Crawford's defamiliarization of the traditional process of landscape painting on a flat surface reawakens our senses to nature, while also allowing us to experience the "artfulness" of the created object, its existence as a man-made artifact -- a work of art. His paintings render the familiar world unfamiliar, so that we may experience its bright surfaces and dark recesses with a renewed sense of wonder. They call our attention to the uniqueness of the landscapes we inhabit, all the time reminding us of art's own singularity. They are truly "landscapes of the imagination."

Fugitive: given to or in the act of running away; moving from place to place; fleeting (OED).

Symmetry: agreement in dimensions, due proportion. Symmetry "pleases/ the eye," but "barely." The certainty that symmetry provides -- everything has its due proportion, there is order in the universe—is soon, almost necessarily, followed by a bigger, more inescapable certainty: we die. Our graves trace the same motif, they "line up/precisely neatly" (lines 6-7) Our "bones," our "ashes/so precise." It "hurts (to know." And, yet, we find some comfort in symmetry. It exists beyond us: "symmetry is where I will go/when I die" (1-2). A statement of fact. Facts are comforting. They have their due proportion, "the way/precisely," "so precise/it hurts"(16), because symmetry is also death. We can arrange graves and bones, but they remain dead, even if the arrangement is beautiful to the eye. But the eye can also be alive. Our inner vision—our imagination—has the power to transcend our finite physical existence. In Elza's poem, the vision is Platonic. The world that appears to our senses is only a copy of a more "real" and perfect realm of forms or ideas that are eternal and changeless, like the idea of symmetry.

Elza's vision of symmetry in this poem, however, is far from changeless; it's dynamic, unpredictable. Elza conveys this dynamism by breaking up the lines in the poem and creating three not-quite-symmetrical word columns. This pattern frees our eyes— "the eye/regimented"—so they can roam freely across the page, tracing new arrangements from left to right (the traditional way we read), but also from top to bottom, across the page, moving up and down from word to word, fragment to fragment, sentence to sentence. Read in this way, the poem becomes a chessboard, our eyes moving the pieces to create surprising combinations. Line 8 reveals a surprising aphorism: "not to waste any time is no challenge to the mind." There are also some Beckettian moments (I see Beckett everywhere), in the third column: “I will go/it pleases/in a way/what is" reminds me of Beckett's characters, so stoic in the face of death, yet so chatty, everything has to be processed through language, in the mind, "to the mind. /any space. the bones. with the eye." So many possibilities here!

I realize I am playing with the language of the poem, "busy re-arranging the bones" (line 11), these "bones" that have escaped their symmetrical "graves," the symmetry of traditional poetic form, to roam free for a little longer, meandering, divagating, taking unexpected turns, having some fun, I hope. It must get boring, "the way graves line up" (line 6).

And I think about the reviewer's words again, "Daniela Elza shapes an unusual format to convey the fugitive nature of words—not to contain but to convey, to give expression to the impermanent and changeable nature of language. Poetic form, by definition, seeks to give shape to the flow of language. Elza's poetic shapes, with their gaps and discontinuities, their unusual line breaks, their idiosyncratic use of typographic marks and their tendency to group words in new and strange combinations, are designed not only to convey the "fugitive nature" of language but also to "re-align" the way we see. After all, there is no escape from "symmetry," that much we know. But we can choose to look at it in a new and surprising way. That much she knows.

Today is World Art Day!I've put together some art works by Salt Spring artists. These are works that evoke a particular feeling or thought, or pose a question. My aim is to get closer to an understanding of art as an expression of the artist's imagination -- of his or her imaginative engagement with the world. Is my own engagement with the works an imaginative act?

What does it say to me? : "I want to create a shape that evokes and at the same time obscures its referent in the real world." The first time I saw this piece, several images began to form in my mind: first a bridge, then a gun (did I see a trigger on the right-hand side?). A closer look revealed a mask, some facial features, a cartoonish drawing of a face. I was quite disappointed with my inability to see more complex and interesting figures in this mesmerizing work. Why do I find it mesmerizing, I wondered? Even slightly disturbing in its refusal to be explained easily. Is it because I can't really see anything that points to an object in the real world? As it happens, there is a referential point, but the artist has manipulated perspective and composition in such a way that, when we find out what this object is, we only catch a brief glimpse of it before it disappears once again. The question that emerges then is not "what am I looking at and not seeing?" but "What am I not looking at and seeing after all?" And there is no answer to this question, or no single answer, just the question of perception and how our intellect wants to find a point of reference while our imagination seeks finer textures and concatenations.

Representation or imagination? A dialogue, an oscillation between the two.

What about the title? How does the title, "Lancaster (Falling out with Love Again)" bear any relation to the painting? Is this a work about "love" or about what it feels like to "fall out" with the idea of love? Maybe, like the object that inspired the image (an object that shall remain hidden…), the title was inspired by a specific event in the artist's life, a break-up perhaps. If this is the case, we can think of this break-up as the reference point around which to construct an interpretation of the work. After all, nothing in the piece itself says that it isn't "about" love; nothing in it says that it is, either. The title is a playful reminder that art, as Susan Sontag tells us, cannot be easily explained or paraphrased. To interpret a painting or a poem we need to cut out content— life details, historical context, technical explanations or artists' statements— "so that we can see the thing at all." My background is in literature and textual analysis. I could, if I put my mind to it, offer a more or less convincing interpretation of the relationship between the title and the painting that would demonstrate that love is its central theme. But, would that illuminate the painting any more? Would it make its meaning intelligible for the viewer? J. Robert Moss's painting raises interesting and relevant questions about the importance of meaning, reference and the value of interpretation in art. And it does it quietly, by being nothing more and nothing less than what appears to us when we finally realize that what we see is not necessarily what we are looking at.

After the curfew comes freedom, a release. Emergent shapes and shades of colour. If I read the canvas from left to right, like a piece of writing, I see lines forming, then a splotch of ink -- more like a glob or a pool of ink. I like the onomatopoeic words that the painting is suggesting to me: splotch, glob, drip, swish. I feel the movement of the brush on the surface and I follow the contours. Not so different from writing. Underneath an eye forms. Something that resists the pull of geometry, that tries to resist. What do we see when we look at an abstract painting? Shapes. What do we hear? The movement of the brush. I keep reading. Cubes and rectangles begin to appear. Now we have some shape, some order, but is there any sense? After the curfew ends, we prepare for its return. It's a human compulsion, to be contained, to contain.

I am looking at a shiny photograph of a very tactile painting, actually. Tactile in the sense that it asks to be touched: its textured surface calls me to feel it with my hands, not only with my imagination. The brush work is rough. Irregular strokes. After the curfew I don't care about what this is going to look like; I am only glad I can step outside again. Planks of wood of the kind you find in a construction site. Rock surface. Does it want to be absorbed through my senses, instead of my imagination? Is my attempt to read the painting an attempt to tame its energy, to control it by giving it some meaning?

Abstract painting can sometimes maintain a very tenuous relation to the real world. As my eyes move around the surfaces that keep emerging, I want this painting to have some relation to the real world. I want to see an industrial landscape, but I only see a disintegrating landscape. A disintegrating landscape of the imagination.

What does it say to me? "I'm trying to dissolve shape into colour and texture. Against the compulsion of form."

"The imagination builds 'walls' of impalpable shadows, comforts itself with the illusion of protection -- or, just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls." Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

Samuel Beckett in his corner, silent, unlike his characters, who cannot stop the flow of words. On the left, his room in the house in Roussillon. I find this photo of Beckett quite calming and reassuring, although I know from his writing that he "trembled" behind the "thick walls" of the language he created to comfort himself with the "illusion of protection." It is interesting to see how the photo montage seems to push him further into his corner. In practical terms, this is the only way to fit both images within the constraints of the frame—if Beckett's picture was placed over the image of the room, it would conceal an important part of the scene under a section of white wall. This way, the empty space is filled by images. How curious, that Beckett's writing keeps trying to fill those spaces, those empty gaps, so that he doesn't have to look into the abyss, when everything he does is look into that abyss and "tremble." How curious that the empty room is boxing him into his corner, but there he is, as always, contemplating the human condition with equanimity, even if a little fed up with it (at least in this photo). You box me in and I fill you with words. The space of the blank page, that is. "Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of." The Unnamable.

This is how Spanish writer Javier Marias interprets Beckett's photograph in Vidas Escritas (Written Lives):“[the shoes] are the main object in the photo of Beckett too, except that their owner, seated almost on the floor and in a corner, seems slightly terrified of them. He is another hounded man, but at least he is not surprised by the hounding: he’s ready for it; he is holding a cigarette in his right and his left hand seems to be adorned, incongruously for someone so sober, with a bracelet rather than a wristwatch. His clothes are nothing out of the ordinary, although his cufflinks look like handcuffs. If it weren’t for those large shoes, the only thing that would matter, as in any portrait of Beckett, would be his head and those eagle eyes, which stare straight out with a truly animal expression, as if they did not understand the need for this moment of eternity, or why anyone should want to photograph it…..”

Two weeks ago I saw Nicola Wheston's exhibition at Duthie Gallery in Salt Spring. The title, "Stuff," hints at our obsession with the accumulation of material possessions and our unhealthy attachment to things. "With the paintings in “Stuff”," Wheston explains, "I wish to reveal some of this pathology, including the sadness, the need to fill the empty places within ourselves," something that she does successfully. Her domestic scenes, all of which feature women surrounded by piles of household objects and cleaning implements in bright reds, yellows, greens and blues, perfectly capture the messiness and clutter in our modern homes.

It was a powerful experience. The brightly-coloured life-sized canvases were curiously seductive and overwhelming in equal measures. Their seductiveness for me lay in the Pop-Art -inspired bold colour scheme and use of everyday objects, but, mostly, in the illusion of depth induced by Wheston's skilful use of perspective. At times, it felt as if the paintings were beckoning me to step into their spaces. But, as I got closer, I had an eerie sense that the objects were suspended on a flat plane, ready to spill out and fall on top of me. This curious visual effect shifted my attention away from the overt theme of the exhibition and made me focus instead on the role of space in the paintings. Yes, I was looking at a series of carefully-organized and crafted tableaux in the style of old historical paintings and portraits. In these traditional works, the aim is to represent reality while at the same time shaping it and containing it within the boundaries of a frame. I realized that Wheston's paintings also articulated this theme of containment: how our living spaces, like the space of the canvas, act as containers, vessels or repositories for our lives ; how our rooms -- the real ones and the ones we imagine in art -- can harbour and at the same time give expression to our deepest thoughts and desires, projected onto walls and surfaces, hidden in corners or contained in the objects that we choose to fill their spaces with. AsGaston Bachelard reminds us in The Poetics of Space, our living spaces, and those represented in art and literature, have their own "poetics," their own "imaginative way of being." They are more than representations of our internal worlds. They constitute a topography, a map of "our intimate being," where complex and contradictory desires co-exist, like the desire to accumulate to excess, and the need to contain and control. Our living spaces are always sites of tension and ambivalence, of the ebb and flow of desire.

So, how has Wheston imagined this map of desire in her paintings? What kind of space has she created to articulate its complexities? A contained and organized space that, on closer inspection, yields something more. The painting at the top of this page, "Roast Beef," is the one that best expresses this dynamic, for me. It presents a kitchen where objects abound but don't crowd each other, where everything has a place and nothing overflows. Even the garbage has its proper place: in the can, on the floor. The woman standing at the front, holding a plate of roast dinner, is strangely immobile, lifeless, yet has a commanding presence. She is the point around which all the other objects accumulate. Hoarding is the external and exaggerated expression of human desire, which, psychoanalysis tells us, is fundamentally impossible to satisfy. Wheston imagines a space where the desire to accumulate objects can somewhat be tamed within the space of the canvas and the boundaries created by the frame, captured in one single static shot. Only that there is something compelling and strangely alluring about the objects displayed, their colours, the soft yet firm brush-work that creates the feeling of volume and space that calls the viewer to look closer, to reach inside and touch. Suddenly, the woman was no longer flat and lifeless but full and rounded, exuding eroticism in her skimpy nightdress. The more I looked at her, the more I realized that her body was uncomfortably contained by the lines that form her shape on the canvas. Shadows began to emerge, colours appeared to dissolve a little ; the water bottle began to look strangely misshapen. The illusion of containment and organization was beginning to soften, allowing the exuberance of the painting to shine through : the textures and colours, the softness of touch, the loving care employed to paint each and every object -- the artistry at work. That's when I felt the compulsion to walk "through the looking glass," only to be confronted by the reality of a flat surface. I was back in the realm of structure and form, of straight lines and composition. But now the woman was looking straight at me with a soft yet slightly ironic expression, as if saying, "See? You also live in a place like this, full of stuff. You also feel the pull to let go, and the pull to keep everything in place. And you can't let go. Or you won't let go. But sometimes you just have to. See? This is your imaginative space, too."

About Nuria Belastegui

I'm a Spanish and English teacher and occasional university lecturer living on Salt Spring Island, on the West Coast of Canada.My background is in literature and literary analysis; I hold an MA in Twentieth-Century Literary Studies and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Liverpool (UK). At the moment, I'm interested in the relationship between literature and visual art, particularly the way literary language can help illuminate hidden or unexplored areas in a painting. I am also attracted to poetry that has a visual component. Most of my posts so far have focused on selected works by Salt Spring artists, but I am also interested in exploring work by other artists.